Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Rush Limbaugh Show on High-Speed Rail

One of the initiatives of the Obama Administration has been high-speed rail. Take existing Amtrak lines and convert them to these 110 to 115 mile an hour trains and put these trains where there isn’t Amtrak service right now. They’re pushing this all over America right now. It’s extremely expensive. All over the country, you’re seeing states you think would support these train lines because they’re getting the trains are objecting. They are objecting on the basis that it costs too much.

(Paragraph about general pork barrel spending omitted here. See below for total pork barrel spending text.)

In my own state of Wisconsin, Obama is pushing a high-speed rail line between the cities of Milwaukee and Madison. They’re only 75 miles apart. When traffic is terrible it’s only a 90 minute drive… when it’s terrible. It’s usually a little bit less than that. It’s an annoying drive, but it’s do-able. He wants to put a high-speed bullet train there – a train that will go 115 miles per hour and maybe you’ll be able to complete the trip in an hour.

The cost for this line – which is a little over 80 miles – is $810 million, paid for by the federal government. The leading Republican candidate for Governor in my state, Scott Walker, is running television ads saying he’ll kill the train if you elect him. Those ads are resonating across Wisconsin. He’s saying, “If you elect me, I’ll kill this pork they’re trying to give us” – and he sees it as a winning political issue.

First of all, he recognizes that our state of Wisconsin will be on the hook for operating costs for this train. He also realizes that those costs will have to be taken out of his own State budget and will mean less money for roads, less money for local busses.

The point that I’m making is that he has a winning issue here, he perceives, by opposing federal money. The Democratic candidate for governor, the Mayor of Milwaukee, is saying; “Well, if we don’t take this money for the train, they’re just going to give it to another State.” People aren’t buying that. They’d rather not have the pork at all than have it wasted in their own area.

This is a fundamental change. I think people are now open to considering that all of this government spending is bad, even if they get it. They look at stimulus. $816 billion that supposedly is being spent. They can’t find any example of it in their own daily lives. They don’t see any jobs being created. They’re turning their noses up at the notion that the government should be spending, and spending, and spending and spending and spending without any consequence at all.

If they’re willing to object to rail, they may be willing to object to a lot more pork. But more importantly, I think it tells you that there is a change in attitude going on in this country.

The media has a way of missing a lot of things because they are blind to them. When you don’t want to see something, you don’t see it.

There’s something going on right now on an issue that I think is really important and it tells you that 2010 is a different year. One of the initiatives of the Obama Administration has been high-speed rail. Take existing Amtrak lines and convert them to these 110 to 115 mile an hour trains and put these trains where there isn’t Amtrak service right now. They’re pushing this all over America right now. It’s extremely expensive. All over the country, you’re seeing states you think would support these train lines because they’re getting the trains are objecting. They are objecting on the basis that it costs too much.

We all know what the problem with political pork is: Everybody says they’re against it, but everybody wants their own piece of pork. It’s why Congressmen and Senators of both parties have tried to “deliver the mail” back home. “Well, I know we spend too much money – but I want to make sure that our State gets its fair share.” So we object to everybody’s “Bridge to Nowhere” until we get a “Bridge to Nowhere.” We object to every building named after a Congressman across the United States until that building is in our own area and it’s for something we like. This has been the problem all along. Earmarks occurred and Congressional pork occurred because Congressmen benefited politically by bringing that stuff back home. But now that we are spending ourselves blind and people are truly terrified that we don’t have a way of digging out from under this debt – they understand the numbers; they don’t have to be actuaries, they realize the baby-boomers are aging… that this large group of taxpayers is going to be transitioning to people who are going to be on the dole collecting Medicare and Social Security and not paying as much in taxes – so how are we ever going to pay off this debt? How are we ever going to get an economy that has a balanced budget? How are we ever going to be able survive without paying the entire GDP out in servicing our own debt? And they’re now open to rejecting pork. This isn’t isolated.

In my own state of Wisconsin, Obama is pushing a high-speed rail line between the cities of Milwaukee and Madison. They’re only 75 miles apart. When traffic is terrible it’s only a 90 minute drive… when it’s terrible. It’s usually a little bit less than that. It’s an annoying drive, but it’s do-able. He wants to put a high-speed bullet train there – a train that will go 115 miles per hour and maybe you’ll be able to complete the trip in an hour.

The cost for this line – which is a little over 80 miles – is $810 million, paid for by the federal government. The leading Republican candidate for Governor in my state, Scott Walker, is running television ads saying he’ll kill the train if you elect him. Those ads are resonating across Wisconsin. He’s saying, “If you elect me, I’ll kill this pork they’re trying to give us” – and he sees it as a winning political issue.

First of all, he recognizes that our state of Wisconsin will be on the hook for operating costs for this train. He also realizes that those costs will have to be taken out of his own State budget and will mean less money for roads, less money for local busses.

The point that I’m making is that he has a winning issue here, he perceives, by opposing federal money. The Democratic candidate for governor, the Mayor of Milwaukee, is saying; “Well, if we don’t take this money for the train, they’re just going to give it to another State.” People aren’t buying that. They’d rather not have the pork at all than have it wasted in their own area.

This is a fundamental change. I think people are now open to considering that all of this government spending is bad, even if they get it. They look at stimulus. $816 billion that supposedly is being spent. They can’t find any example of it in their own daily lives. They don’t see any jobs being created. They’re turning their noses up at the notion that the government should be spending, and spending, and spending and spending and spending without any consequence at all.

If they’re willing to object to rail, they may be willing to object to a lot more pork. But more importantly, I think it tells you that there is a change in attitude going on in this country.